Sunday, March 20, 2016

Tomorrowland (2015): plain boring :yawn:

Plot:
An adult Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) relate to the audience their experiences, beginning with Frank's visit to the 1964 New York World's Fair as a child. In the flashback, he (Thomas Robinson) meets David Nix (Hugh Laurie), an official who is unimpressed with Frank's prototype jet pack. Frank does draw the attention of a young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy). Seeing his potential, Athena gives Frank a pin embossed with a "T" symbol and tells him to follow her aboard the fair's "It's a Small World" attraction. Frank sneaks onto the ride, where his pin is scanned and he is transported into a futuristic cityscape known as Tomorrowland. He falls from a ledge, but straps on his jet pack in mid air and lands safely before Nix and Athena.

The narration then shifts to the present, where Casey takes over from Frank to relate her story of how she sneaks into a decommissioned NASA launch pad in Cape Canaveral, where her father Eddie (Tim McGraw) is an engineer. She sabotages the machines that are dismantling the launch pad and returns home where Athena sneaks another pin that is programmed to Casey's DNA into Casey's motorcycle helmet. The next night, Casey attempts to break into the NASA compound again, but is arrested. At the police station, she sees the pin among her personal items, and discovers that upon contact, the pin instantly shows her a view of Tomorrowland that only she can see. She briefly explores the vision until the pin's battery runs out.

Assisted by her brother Nate, Casey finds a Houston memorabilia store related to the pin, but upon meeting the two owners, Hugo and Ursula (Kathryn Hahn), Casey is questioned about it, and when she says she knows nothing else about it, they attack her. Athena bursts in and fights Hugo and Ursula, who are both revealed to be robots. The two girls escape as the robots self-destruct, destroying the store. After stealing a car, Athena reveals that she is an Audio-Animatronic robot, and the one who gave Casey the pin, revealing that she needs her help to save the world. Athena drives Casey to Frank's home in Pittsfield, New York and leaves her there.

The reclusive Frank declines Casey's request for an audience, but she manages to lure him out of the house and sneak in, locking him out. Frank re-enters through a secret tunnel and tells her angrily that he was thrown out of Tomorrowland and cannot go back. He also asks if she would like to know the exact moment of her death. Casey ponders whether accepting the truth about her time of death would actually be the cause of it, and while she admits that she would like him to tell her, says that she probably would not believe him, preferring to make her own destiny. When she says this, a monitor showing the probability of the end of the world changes its reading from 100% to 99.9994%, which startles Frank. Robot agents appear at Frank's house ordering him to turn over Casey or be killed.

After evading the robots and reuniting with Athena, the trio uses a teleportation machine that Frank invented, and transport themselves to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They enter a room with mannequins of Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison. Frank explains that the four men were the founders of Plus Ultra, a group of inventors dedicated to finding other dreamers and inventors who shared the hope of shaping a better future, which eventually led them to discover a new dimension where Tomorrowland was founded. The trio enter a rocket hidden underneath the tower, which launches into outer space and after traveling through dimensions, lands back on Earth, arriving at a now desolate Tomorrowland. Nix appears to greet them, and takes them to a building linked to a tachyon machine designed by Frank that can show images from the past and future, from which Casey learns that a worldwide catastrophe will happen in the near future. Because of this discovery, Frank lost all hope and was banished from Tomorrowland. Casey does not accept that the world is destined to end, and the future slightly changes as a result, a fact that Frank glimpses, but which Nix ignores before ordering them arrested.

As they await being sent back to their time on Earth, Casey realizes that a side effect of utilizing tachyons to obtain information about the future is that it introduces a backfeed into the time flow. It makes the future it shows all the more likely to occur, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Destroying the device could avert the apocalypse. Nix opens a portal to an idyllic beach dimension, inviting them to live out the last days there, but Frank refuses, seeing that Nix has simply given up on Earth and intends to allow the apocalypse to happen. A fight ensues and Frank tries to use a bomb to blow up the machine. However, during the ensuing fights, Casey failed to deliver the bomb to the machine. In order to save their lives, she throws the bomb outside the portal and the explosion pins Nix's leg under debris. Nix retrieves a plasma gun and aims at Frank. Athena, who was able to see it happening beforehand due to the tachyon images, jumps in front of him and is damaged beyond repair, which activates her self-destruct sequence. In her last moments of consciousness, Athena instructs Frank to take her to the machine and reveals that she loved him. Her self-destruction bomb takes down the machine and kills Nix as well.

Back in the present, Frank and Casey's audience are revealed to be androids like Athena, who are entrusted with new pins and instructed to bring other "dreamers" to Tomorrowland.

Review:
The movie is boring! i couldn't help but feeling antagonistic towards Casey who is a major spoiled brat! i mean, there's nothing to like about her, maybe us the audience were not given enough background story to warm up to her but seriously, i do not like her. she's into vandalism, she runs off from home at night, she asks her little brother to lie for her, she hijacks a car, she terrorizes Frank and like her, i don't know why Athena thought her to be special. you know what, i wish they would choose another actress to play Casey, someone younger and more believable.

GC plays the disgruntled inventor character to a tee. except that i don't get it, in the beginning of the movie, Frank sound pessimistic about the future. and their narration was done back at Frank's house. yet in the end of the movie, the narration is in fact done in Tomorrowland. there is some continuity issue also when they escape in the bath tub. Frank was on the right side. but as they landed in the pond, he went out from the left side.

i know, i could be petty and point out that how on earth there is a jet pack nearby to be used to fly Athena to the machines. plus, just because Nix died, look, how can it be so easy for people from Tomorrowland to embrace Frank and Casey? sigh.. i feel demotivated talking about this movie :(

but i would like to applaud both Thomas Robinson and Raffey Cassidy. they are really likeable. plus, TR does a very good job at picking up GC's mannerism, the eye tic and all, they are similar-like!